Distinguished Lecturer: Samuel Preston, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania
Presentation: Smoking, Obesity, and American Longevity

Biography

Samuel H. Preston, Ph.D., is professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. in economics from Amherst College in 1965 and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1968. The major area of interest throughout his career has been the health of populations, including methods for measuring and analyzing health. He has devoted special attention to cause-of-death patterns across space and time, to the impact of cigarette smoking on aggregate mortality levels, and to the factors that have driven the massive mortality improvements of the past century. His empirical account of the changing relationship between a country's life expectancy and its per capita income—summarized by the Preston curve—is one of the most frequently cited articles in demography.

Recipient of a MERIT award from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), for the past several years he has been the principal investigator of an NIA grant evaluating the contribution of obesity to international differences in life expectancy. He has served as the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at University of Pennsylvania and President of the Population Association of America and the Sociological Research Association. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society. He has won the Irene B. Taeuber and Cecil G. Sheps Awards from the Population Association of America and was designated Laureate of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. He has chaired 60 Ph.D. dissertation committees at University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Washington.